Field
As radio access network (RAN) architecture evolves towards cloud RAN (C-RAN) deployments, and evolved packet core (EPC) deployments get more distributed to capitalize on local breakout/content delivery, there is an opportunity to provide significant optimizations of latency and processing. Certain embodiments can provide these and other benefits using vertical aggregation of radio access network and evolved packet core functionalities.
Description of the Related Art
Conventional networks have evolved Node Bs (eNBs) distributed at the cell sites and network elements such as a mobility management entity (MME), serving gateway (SGW), and/or packet data network (PDN) gateway (PGW) centralized at regional, or even national, centers.
As RAN evolves towards C-RAN, baseband RAN may be aggregated at a larger scale. At the same time, operators of RANs may be interested in more distributed EPCs, to enable local breakout/content delivery, reduction in signaling latencies, and the like.
In conventional protocol stacks in RAN and EPC there are several intermediary interfaces and protocol layers. For example, on the control plane there is interface S1, which is stream control transmission protocol (SCTP)-based, and interface S11, which is general packet radio service (GPRS) tunneling protocol (GTP)-c/user datagram protocol (UDP) based, among other interfaces. On the user plane, there are a series of GTP tunnels from the PGW to the SGW and from the SGW to the eNB.
These protocols may in some cases fragment and duplicate of information. For example, on the control plane, part of the user equipment's (UE's) context is at a radio resource control (RRC) layer and part at a network access stratum (NAS) layer, with S1 as an intermediary.